Back in July, Blake Hurst, a Missouri farmer, penned “The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals,” for the online edition of The American: The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute. This past weekend, Tom Philpott of Maverick Farms posted his reply, “An agri-intellectual talks back“. I recommend you read both articles.

What was most interesting to me was that both writers take it for granted that we are rethinking how we value food and farming. And both see the stakes clearly. As we no longer stop at “can we feed the world?” but instead ask “can we feed the world healthier food?”, society will begin to divvy up the pie differently.

That’s why the fireworks are shaping up over innovation. We can expect agri-academics and apparatchiks from all corners to keep themselves occupied for at least the rest of this decade debating appropriate technology and what constitutes a breakthrough.

Just yesterday, the postman delivered one of Andy Kleinschmidt’s tweet-inspired t-shirts to my door. The shirt reads “Agriculture =Applied Environmental Protection.” What the Hurst-Philpott brouhaha points out is that there will be competing paradigms for how we fill in that equation for a long time to come.